Are we just not gonna talk about Hasan Minhaj

5 min readNov 24, 2020

The Ellen debacle has been well documented. And by the Ellen debacle, I mean the bruhaha in which she has pretended to be nice and kind, has built an entire career and brand around “be kind,” only for us to we find out that she has treated her staff in a terrible manner, and that she was not, in fact, kind. At all.

Around the same time that the issues with Ellen were becoming public this year, tweets from women of colour — especially South Asian women — who worked on Patriot Act with Hassan Minhaj, came out. They were sharing their experiences on Minhaj’s lauded show as a gesture of solidarity with other people who worked on shows — shows that have been sold to the public as morally and ethically upright but which treated their staff in a dismal manner.
First, Sheila Vee, a former producer on the show, tweeted about her experience, only to go on to protect her tweets. That is understandable. After all, Minhaj is beloved by the “woke” Desis, and the social justice crowd in general. She was making herself a target by telling the truth.
I’ve been thinking all day about @prachigu and @amalykinz’s tweets on their former workplaces, and how much courage it must have taken to speak out. So I’d like to join them and say, I’ve never been more unhappy than when I was working at Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj.

— Sheila V Kumar (@SheilaVee) June 8, 2020
Image for post
A longer screenshot of Kumar’s comments that have since been made private.
That Kumar has worked in a lot of places, and has probably seen a lot of terrible workplaces, especially workplaces run by white people, and still consider Patriot Act to be something that she has never experienced before, hints to us just how bad a working environment Patriot Act was.
In response to Sheila Vee’s tweets, other women of colour who worked on Patriot Act also came forward with their stories. These include Pakistani news producer and writer Nur Nasreen.

Nasreen’s point about a progressive ethos in front of the screen versus the hypocrisy of how un-progressively you treat the women of colour who work under you has really stuck with me. It is because, in my experience, this is what most social justice spaces have been like. For women like me, who have neither pretty or thin privilege, or light-skin or class privilege, social justice “activists” shun women like me because I do not have the connections and networks that they want access to in order to further their careers.
Many of these people are being lauded by our communities but if you talk to the most vulnerable amongst us, you will know how these people really treat those they see as having no value to them.
The dissonance between the progressive way these people present themselves and how they actually treat people is THE reason I have stopped going to social justice events or being part of these c̵l̵i̵q̵u̵e̵s̵, oh I mean, communities.
Nasreen’s honest tweets prompted other women who worked on and around Patriot Act to talk about their experiences or what they have heard from others. New York Times writer Iva Dixit tweeted about how her friends on the show were made to feel.

As someone who has worked in toxic workplaces where I was the victim of racism and misogyny, I intimately know the kind of breakdowns this treatment leads to.
I think it is really telling the kind of fear and shame that these women who have been exploited live with, versus the kind of impunity that men like Hassan Minhaj have.

Camille continues by talking about what she felt and how she was made to feel with regards to her concerns.

As with most victims of gaslighting, it is when you have left a toxic relationship or workplace that you realize that you had done nothing wrong, and the anger you feel at being gaslit comes up.

South Asian women were not the only ones treated abysmally while they were working on this show. Other women of colour came forward to corroborate these stories.

What stands out for me here is that the special episodes that Minhaj’s show became known for, like the episode on Indian Elections, was not due to his special brilliance and wonderful politics. Those episodes happened due to smart, Brown women like Kumar and Nasreen, whose work was mined for Minhaj’s fame and star while the women themselves were being treated badly.
Their experiences were even corroborated by male writers who had worked there.

Clearly, a number of women who worked on the show as well and even the men who witnessed it felt compelled to speak up. This hints at a truly toxic work environment that clearly implicated Minhaj, in much the same way that Ellen was implicated in how her show treated its workers. Juggernaut writer Sarah Thankam Matthews tweeted in response to these women sharing their pain.

Are we just not gonna talk about Hasan Minhaj

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